The end credits are accompanied by clips of Porter from the Emmy-winning documentary Gridiron Gang (1993), which prove that key scenes from this movie were lifted straight from life and that life needs better writers.

Screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) has turned the Italian romantic comedy "L'Ultimo Bacio" (2001) into something smarter, funnier, and more penetrating.

Just when I'm ready to write off the mockumentary as an exhausted form, along comes this delightful and hilarious improv comedy from the UK in which a bridal magazine sets up a promotional contest for the best offbeat wedding.

It's become a critical cliche to say that everyone in the U.S. should see a particular war documentary, but even the most selfish citizen might want to check out The Ground Truth, because unlike the Iraqi victims of the war, the American ones are all around us.

This interminable, poorly constructed drug thriller by writer-director Frank E. Flowers sat on the shelf for two years before winning a release.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon isn't so much a history of Lennon's pacifism as a continuation of it, the last bed-in, so to speak, with contemporary figures like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky on hand to connect Vietnam with Iraq, President Nixon with President Bush, and the FBI's spying on Lennon with the current administration's domestic surveillance.

Director Niall Johnson struggles to find the proper tone: the serial murders aren't horrible enough to be funny, and the characters don't respond as if they're horrible at all. As a result the black humor thins into gray fog.

I love Franken and wish there were more funny liberals in the chattering class, but his crushing sarcasm wouldn't exactly elevate the national debate.

The period details and performances are uniformly superb (Bob Hoskins is especially good as MGM executive Eddie Mannix), and the major characters are even more complex than those in "Chinatown."

A general lack of charm make this pretty tough to sit through.

Crushingly dull teen horror flick.

Gyllenhaal turns the young ex-con into an enormously sympathetic figure, but by the end there's no denying that her need for the girl is as selfish as her addiction.

The movie's realism is unimpeachable, though American cops might be stunned by the idea of a half-dozen detectives being assigned to the murder of an anonymous floater.

This is somewhat fuzzy as narrative, but it's a potent mood piece, and its portait of urban loneliness has some of the intensity of "Taxi Driver" without the violence.

Predictable but sincere.

This Argentinean comedy is short on plot and leisurely in its character development, though by the end it's become a modest and genial portrait of a dysfunctional family.

Endorsed by the Dalai Lama and narrated by his nephew Tenzin L. Choegyal, this delivers an impassioned plea to save Tibet's endangered culture but little new information.

Keith is an awkward, galumphing presence, but he's more fun to watch than Kelly Preston as the girl's uptight mother.

This is one of those movies whose empty-headed premise is so pure it's witty: with his insatiable need for excitement, the hero is a perfect stand-in for the fanboys in the audience.

A real air ball, this lethargic drama by Preston A. Whitmore II is so poorly scripted that most of the major plot developments occur offscreen.

For this remake writer-director Neil LaBute has moved the action from Scotland to Washington State, added enough scares for Warner Brothers to market the movie as horror, and turned the story into an almost comically Wagnerian expression of the castration anxiety that snakes through his original screenplays.

It's a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star).

One of Bujalski's gifts is his ability to give every part, no matter how big or small, a sense of intelligence and life that extends beyond the frame and running time, and in this his work recalls the best of both Mike Leigh and Richard Linklater.

The main activity charted in the documentary is a kind of adolescent mischief, as Dick and a private investigator seek to uncover and expose the anonymous MPAA employees.

Judge races through some of his most provocative ideas in the opening minutes and ignores his story's many logical inconsistencies; the movie is bracing for its bile but ultimately more frustrating than funny.

This gets off to a pretty good start, with most of the laughs coming from beefy Kevin Heffernan and nerdy Steve Lemme. But at 111 minutes, the movie is too slackly paced to build up enough momentum; like the characters they play, these guys don't know when to call it a night.

Director Bryan Barber (known for his music videos) and his cast display so much gusto that it's hard to keep up your resistance--I wound up finding this more enjoyable than the Oscar-bestrewn "Chicago."

The movie gathers steam as these little terrors up the ante with each new gross-out recipe. Former child star Hallie Kate Eisenberg, blooming into a beautifully poised young woman, grounds the film as Benward's loyal supporter.

The genre shows serious signs of wear in this needlessly fictionalized feature about Vince Papale.

With its pathetic characters, questionable logic, and wall-to-wall Beethoven, the movie is a serious contender for this year's Golden Turkey award.

This Spanish comedy showcases a gallery of popular actresses, but writer-director Manuel Gomez Pereira gives them nothing to work with aside from tiresome romantic complications.

Its labored goofiness seldom transcends the stale format.

The plot of this character-driven drama is slender and the digital images rather muddy--apparently an impoverished indie feature can look bad and still not be very interesting--but to his credit, Thelemaque sticks to his minimalist turf. And the dogs are great.

The plot is ridiculous and the characters are cardboard, but none of that really matters once the snakes get into the cabin and start zapping people, the very definition of entertainment.

Sublimely stupid.

A lush piece of romanticism.

Painfully unfunny comedy.

Despite some fine black comedy, this hovers uncertainly between the novel's tragic precision and "Barfly's" existential burlesque.

It wasn't so bad, aside from the god-awful ending; at the very least Freundlich manages to come up with funnier jokes than the ossified one-liners decorating Allen's recent movies.

Despite the resourcefulness of the two leads, the movie finally registers as much ado about very little.

The remake begins with the same premise and appropriates the most striking visuals, grafting them onto a more explicable but equally dull George Romero-style doomsday scenario.

Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.

A dedicated, charismatic, crack-addicted history teacher is the most believable protagonist in an American movie this year.

This French variation on the backwoods horror movie proves that even a little thematic complexity in the early scenes can yield a substantial payoff when things get going.

This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing.

Director Zak Tucker is a bit too fond of jump cuts as signifiers of edginess. Still, when the material doesn't get in the way he's pretty good at getting across the emotional content.

I don't question the legitimacy of celebrating the courage of these individuals and their families, and I can even tolerate the hokey nostalgia for World War II epics. But I'm troubled that the filmmakers have elided so much else of what happened on that day, as if it were some kind of neutral backdrop.

Weird anachronisms (cars, telephones, home computers) contribute to the craziness, but despite the copious imagination on display, this is a fairly long haul.

This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.

The CGI is excellent, with characters whose depth and solidity suggest Nick Park's clay animations.

The movie's suggestiveness gives way to a certain thinness and lassitude.

Unlike many other purveyors of hip comedy, they're consistently clever without being contemptuous of their audience.

This 2004 French feature seems concerned not so much with the psychopathology of everyday life as with psychopaths who lurk behind the everyday.

As a substantial piece of the puzzle, this is worthwhile viewing.

Despite some awkwardness, this feature by writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland is a fascinating look at the area's Mexican-American milieu and other local subcultures, full of feeling, insight, and touching performances.

This funny, nervy, and pointedly unrated geriatric sex comedy is both enhanced and occasionally limited by being targeted at baby boomers.

Apart from a few sleek shots involving boats or helicopters, the action eventually devolves into a standard war-movie shootout.

Allen doesn't get us to care much about any of the characters here.

Betty Thomas, directing a script by TV veteran Jeff Lowell, seems uncertain whether to sympathize with her three heroines or with the title cad, but there's something mildly charming about this cheerful revenge comedy's lack of any straightforward moral agenda.

Based on John Nickle's children's book, this computer-animated comedy starts slowly but builds into a rousing adventure capped with just the right measure of sweetness.

13 (Tzameti) might seem allegorical, but it’s too cynically concerned with what works as entertainment to offer larger truths about human existence.

Provocative but also infuriating, this alarmist documentary argues that the levying of a federal income tax in 1913 was unconstitutional and set America on the road to fascism.

The word "raunchy" doesn't begin to describe this.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) are too preoccupied with hip cleverness to have much else on their minds, and the music is so-so.

This quirky 2004 documentary ends with the Shopsins' forced relocation after 32 years, an uprooting made all the more poignant by Eve's death during filming.

As scripted by Michael Arndt, this isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it deftly dramatizes our conflicting desires for individuality and an audience to applaud it.

Scenes of pageantry and mass prayer show that thousands respond to her charisma, but Kounen gives little insight why; aside from Amma's belief that creator and creation are one, her religious tenets remain a mystery.

The documentary becomes more poignant and substantial when old age begins to seriously disable some of the dancers.

By the time Gooding showed up for one of his assignments disguised as a call girl, even "Boat Trip" looked good to me.

In place of the sharply etched observational humor of the original, which featured a host of no-name actors in memorably quirky performances, we now get mostly raunch and some flaccid cameos from Smith cronies Ben Affleck and Jason Lee.

It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own--even the jokes are pretty solemn.

The three neighborhood kids who venture inside this toothy trap are wittily conceived (as are other characters, like a goth babysitter), but though the overall conception suggests Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle," the frenetic pacing seems as American as an apple pie in your face.

A lot of superwimp gags executed by Luke Wilson grow out of this premise, as do some tacky 50s-style special effects. The movie's too slapdash to keep its characters consistent, but this has its moments.

The tone is bleak and the comic-book violence relentless, but the wirework and Yuta Morokaji's stunt choreography are impressive, culminating in a breathless showdown between the title character (Aya Ueto) and 200 foes.

The slapstick is funnier for the nifty CGI, and the script gets in some sly digs at racist cops and multitasking soccer moms.

Working with a shapeless script, directors Anthony and Joe Russo (Welcome to Collinwood) can't figure out what they're making. They lunge in several directions, but fail to get around the central problem: most of their actors have little flair for comedy.

Volatile and sometimes daring performances by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi, and Lubna Azabal (as twins) contribute to the highly charged and novelistic experience.

Director Billy Kent seems to have instructed most of his actors to behave like robotic sitcom characters; the principal exception is Danny DeVito, who simply behaves like Danny DeVito.

2005 French feature by the highly uneven Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand), who doesn't have much to say about his subject that's fresh.

Disappointing adaptation of Mamet's 1982 drama.

This highly stylized portrait of a loveless marriage at the beginning of the 20th century merges a claustrophobic theatricality with dazzlingly cinematic wide-screen compositions (the sumptuous cinematography is by Eric Gautier).

I was worn down by the excess: Depp's fruity impersonation of Keith Richards (or William F. Buckley) as pirate Jack Sparrow; too many bottomless chasms on an island with too many jungle savages (after the fashion of Peter Jackson's King Kong); Bill Nighy playing too squishy a villain with a beard of too many crawling octopus tentacles; too much violence, pop nihilism, and sick humor.

The casting of Reeves in the lead role is inspired: who better than the star of "The Matrix" and its sequels, a trilogy that borrows heavily from Dick's sensibility and obsessions, to play a personality split through overindulgence in drugs and manipulation by outside forces he barely recognizes?

The epic poem Beowulf gets an imaginative, low-budget workout in this 2005 Icelandic feature by Sturla Gunnarsson.

The film tackles more than it can master, but it's never less than fascinating, and all three leads are exceptional.

Crary struggles to explain the eruption and influence of the extreme rock underground that began with the late-70s "no wave" scene and eventually generated acts like Swans and Sonic Youth.

Despite the title, this is less a soccer documentary than a corporate hagiography along the lines of "The Last Mogul" or "The Kid Stays in the Picture"; its real hero isn't Cosmos star Pele (who wisely declined to be interviewed), but Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications, which owned the team.

An agreeably shallow comedy.

Singer draws heavily on the 1978 hit that launched the Warner Brothers franchise, with Brandon Routh dully impersonating Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, Kevin Spacey getting all the good lines as the villainous Lex Luthor, and stock footage of Marlon Brando proving that death isn't always a good career move.

There's little originality in the joy rides, first kisses, and clashes with bullies, yet this 2005 debut feature by writer-director Michael Kang captures the small triumphs of a boy becoming a man.

Packs a punch in its first act with a passionate lead performance by Cyndi Williams and a painfully concrete sense of modern life closing in. But gradually it slips into the indie paradigm of an alienated soul rushing into darkness, climaxing with a semiabstract montage sequence that's more rhetorical than dramatic.

Smirky, gum-in-your-hair humor dominates this dreadful 2005 feature.

Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public.

The stilted performances are especially unfortunate when one considers what a fine documentary Clark might have gotten out of the same material.

This comic fantasy is the best vehicle he's (Sandler) ever had, a high-concept goof that gradually darkens into an emotional nightmare reminiscent of Capra.

The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising.

Tries way too hard to be clever and shrewd.

Jayasundara dispenses with conventional story pacing to alternate long, static scenes with moments of revelatory lust or violence; as a press release states, the movie is "composed of uncanny set pieces portraying sex, death, and waiting," though its aesthetic achievement may lie in making all three feel like the same thing.